Learn how to play — 12/05/2024

Want to be a rock star — or just play a few songs at your next gathering? In this week’s cover story, Michael Witthaus talks to some of the local music instructors helping music lovers of all ages achieve their guitar (and piano and more) dreams.

Also on the cover Take a cookie road trip! Tickets are on sale now for next Saturday’s Currier & Ives Cookie Tour in the Monadnock region and for next weekend’s Inn to Inn Cookie Tour up north (see page 22). Symphony New Hampshire celebrates the season with a concert highlighting brass instruments (page 14). And Michael Witthaus talks with Seán Heely about his Celtic Christmas concert (page 32).

Read the e-edition

A graphic the shape of the state of New Hampshire, filled in with the New Hampshire flag made up of the crest of New Hampshire on a blue field.
Veggie recalls Connected to the recall of organic carrots from Grimmway Farms, 4Earth Farms of California recalled “multiple brands of ...
weathered metal plaque with raised text, attached to brick wall
Looking through the artifacts of NH history Ashley Miller is New Hampshire’s State Archivist and Director of the New Hampshire ...
Photo of assorted sports equipment for football, soccer, tennis, golf, baseball, and basketball
The Big Story – Will Jerod Mayo Be Back? Expect that to be the talk until Bob Kraft decides to ...
A graphic the shape of the state of New Hampshire, filled in with the New Hampshire flag made up of the crest of New Hampshire on a blue field.
Just hang up If you feel like you get more phone calls from robots than from actual humans, you’re probably ...
orchestra on stage, conductor at front, man dressed as Santa Claus waving to audience
Thursday, Dec. 5 A new exhibit, “Manchester Inspired: The Life and Works of Marylou Ashooh Lazos,” officially opens at the ...
long haired woman sitting in chair in dimly lit room holding guitar on lap, looking upwards while playing
Discover — or rediscover — your love of making music with help from the experts “So you wanna be a ...
middle aged man with white hair, wearing blue plaid shirt, sitting on couch, portrait
Celebrating the holidays with horns By Zachary [email protected] Executive Director Deanna Hoying is sounding the horn on New Hampshire Symphony’s ...
The latest from NH’s theater, arts and literary communities • Small works: Pillar Gallery + Projects’ newest exhibit is “NANO” ...
wooden a-frame in garden during fall
Final garden chores to do before winter Winter is fast upon us. The shortest days of the year are ahead, ...
Family fun for whenever Holiday happenings • Zach Umperovitch, builder of contraptions of all shapes and sizes, is inviting everyone ...
circular silver bracelet with single silver bead
Dear Donna, Could you give me some advice? I’m looking to market my Cape Cod bracelet. I have worn it ...
headshot of young woman with large smile
Business Systems Analyst Granite Stater Samantha McKeon is a Business Systems Analyst for A.W. Chesterton and spoke to the Hippo ...
Red round icon that reads Weekly Dish
News from the local food scene • Holiday wine tasting: WineNot Boutique (25 Main St., Nashua, 204-5569, winenotboutique.com) will host ...
christmas cookies with coconut in a tin box
Tour inns, eat cookies at a Currier and Ives Cookie Tour It is time for one of the most delicious ...
long table with bins of vegetables for sale
Where to find farmers markets in colder months One of the great joys of summer is shopping for fresh local ...
Susan Chung, owner of Sue’s Kimbap House (Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, 731-9085, Sueskimbaphouse.com) is Capitol ...
Cocktail in stemmed glass on counter surrounded by lemon, bottle of apple cider, an egg, cocktail shaker
1½ ounces bourbon 1 ounce apple cider 1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice ½ ounce simple syrup 1 egg white ...
album covers
Kodak Black, Trill Bill (Capitol Records) This Florida-based rapper boasts the necessary cachet to make him relevant to the current ...
Book cover
How to Winter, by Kari Leibowitz (Penguin Life, 272 pages) When Kari Leibowitz was looking for a research opportunity that ...
screenshot from Moana 2
Moana takes another trip, but this time without the songs of Lin-Manuel Miranda, in Moana 2, a serviceable animated movie ...
Local music news & events • Seasonal standard: Get in the holiday spirit as the Heather Pierson Trio returns to ...
group of people dressed in scottish style garb, standing in front of large rocks outside, holding instruments
Seán Heely’s Celtic Christmas comes to Nashua In 2019, Seán Heely staged his first Celtic Christmas show for a few ...

Classic carols with Celtic flavor

Seán Heely’s Celtic Christmas comes to Nashua

In 2019, Seán Heely staged his first Celtic Christmas show for a few hundred people in his home base of Washington, D.C.

The next time he did it, the audience grew to 1,000, and it doubled the following year. It was clear that an appetite for Heely’s lively blend of fiddle, harp, pipes and other traditional instruments in the service of seasonal songs from the seven Celtic nations resonated, so he decided to take his show on the road.

Just in time for the tour, which stops in Nashua on Friday, Dec. 6, is a new holiday album that Heely and his all-star band will perform. So Merry as We Have Been is named for one of its songs, drawn from the 18th-century Scottish collection The Caledonian Pocket Companion.

The record, Heely said in a recent phone interview, offers classic Christmas carols, “reimagined in the Celtic way … a little bit more jiggified than they might be in the choral setting.” Along with Olde English carols like “I Saw Three Ships” and “Gloucestershire Wassail” are traditional numbers such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Deck the Halls.”

Heely will sing “Silent Night” in three different languages, the original German, English and Gaelic — he was recently named U.S. Champion in the latter. “I’ve been doing a lot of Gaelic songs in the last couple of years, and studying the language pretty hard,” he said. “It’s great to see that recognized.”

On stage with Heely in Nashua are Kevin Elam on guitar and vocals — he’s earned multiple awards for singing, including a competition in Drogheda, Ireland, that only one other American has won in its 65-year history. Lucas Ashby is a Brazilian American percussionist who also plays cello, and Abbie Palmer is a well-regarded multi-genre harp player.

Beth Patterson hails from Louisiana. “She brings in a bit of Cajun French into the show,” Heely said. “We have a French song that she brought into the group; it’s like a Cajun epiphany song. She plays the bouzouki and the bass, electric bass, that’s our one electric instrument.”

The band’s youngest member is fiddler Colin McGlynn. Heely said he’s been playing with the 18-year-old McGlynn for nearly a decade. Jesse Ofgang is a Connecticut-born piper who plays the Highland Pipes, the Scottish Border Pipes, and the Irish Eland Pipes. Rounding out the group are dancers Agi Covacs and Rebecca Law.

Born into a musical family, Heely got into playing early. “My older sister played violin, and I wanted to do everything like her when I was young,” he said. So he picked it up too, “and as soon as I had about five notes that I could play pretty well, my dad had me playing with him. He played the banjo, so I joined the family band…. We played anything from maritime music to bluegrass to Irish and Scottish.”

He once told an interviewer that a fiddle is just a violin that’s had Guinness spilled on it, a glib statement that he somewhat regrets. “The headline ‘violinist with beer spilled on him’ made me sound like a little bit of an alcoholic,” he said, adding, “there are all kinds of funny jokes, like ‘a violin has strings, a fiddle has strangs,’ but there is no actual difference. It is just the way that you play it.”

That said, his interest in fiddle playing began with exploring his paternal grandmother’s record collection.

“We had songs from Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales floating around the house, and she played the piano, so I grew up listening to a lot of that kind of music and folk,” he said. “I’ve branched out a bit, and we even have stuff from Brittany in France and Galicia in Spain, the seven recognized Celtic nations. So that was what spurred me on.”

Also influencing Heely was the time he spent at Alistair Fraser’s fiddle camp on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. “It spurred me on to compete with Scottish fiddling and to keep pursuing that music, because there’s a lot more Irish fiddling in the U.S. than Scottish,” he said. “And of course, it’s so beautiful, all these mountains, the ocean and everything. When you’re playing the music in the place where it was made, it feels pretty special.”

Seán Heely’s Celtic Christmas
When: Friday, Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $49 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 24/12/05

Local music news & events

Seasonal standard: Get in the holiday spirit as the Heather Pierson Trio returns to play music from A Charlie Brown Christmas during an intimate show at a Lakes Region winery preceded by a complimentary tasting. Pierson’s performance of the holiday special includes other Vince Guaraldi songs and jazzed-up favorites. Thursday, Dec. 5, and Friday, Dec. 6, at 7 p.m., The Loft at Hermit Woods, 72 Main St., Meredith, $25 and up at eventbrite.com. More dates at heatherpierson.com.

Helping paws: An annual event with live music from the Bob Pratte Band is a fundraiser for the Manchester Animal Shelter. Dance to classic rock covers and enjoy complimentary appetizers, raffles, giveaways, games and a silent auction, all for a good cause. Friday, Dec. 6, 7 p.m., Stark Brewing Co., 500 N. Commercial St., Manchester, $15 at eventbrite.com.

Holiday shredding: Make the season a surf guitar safari with Gary Hoey rocking up the Christmas spirit at his annual Ho! Ho! Hoey! show. The Dick Dale acolyte first donned his Santa hat in the ’90s, and the frenetic fret man’s franchise now includes Hallmark greeting cards playing rocked-up holiday favorites. Hoey was also featured in Danny DeVito’s 2006 movie Deck The Halls. Friday, Dec. 6, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $40 and up at tupelohall.com.

Dark sounds: Fans of heavy music should experience Fog Wizard, a Boston band that bills itself as that city’s bloodiest and features a lead singer with an unprintable name who looks like he came out on the winning end of a tangle with Freddy Krueger. A local show celebrates their 15th anniversary and includes support from Dead Harrison, Arctic Horror and C.O.B. Saturday, Dec. 7, 7 p.m., Terminus Underground, 134 Haines St., Nashua, $15 at the door, 21+, BYOB.

Blues power: An afternoon performance by Frankie Boy & Blues Express is a fundraiser to help send the three-time Granite State Blues Challenge winners to Memphis for next year’s World Blues Challenge. Once mentored by Chicago blues legend Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson — the band uses his amplifier on stage — the four-piece group offers a full-throated version of the genre. Sunday, Dec. 8, 4 p.m., The Wild Rover, 21 Kosciuszko St., Manchester. Visit thebluesexpress.com.

Moana 2 (PG)

Moana takes another trip, but this time without the songs of Lin-Manuel Miranda, in Moana 2, a serviceable animated movie.

Moana (voice of Auli’i Cravalho) becomes her island’s official wayfinder and gets an ominous message from the ancestors — a vision of her island empty and her people gone. The tribe’s continued existence depends on finding other people spread across the ocean. She sets out — this time with a crew — to find an island she saw a vision of, one that will help her people connect with others. The crew consists of her rooster Heihei (voice of Alan Tudyk) and pig Pua plus three completely unnecessary human characters — builder Loto (voice of Rose Matafeo), farmer Kele (voice of David Fane) and storyteller/beefy dude Moni (voice of Hualālai Chun).

Once on the seas, Moana again meets up with her buddy, the demi-god Maui (voice of Dwayne Johnson), who is having his own issues with Matangi (voice of Awhimai Fraser), a bat goddess lady who is presented as sinister only to become a mushy whatever that the movie sort of sets aside until a mid-credits scene I didn’t see. Eventually, Maui and Moana’s crew team up to face a thunderstorm god-type guy who has sunk the island they need to find. The group works to bring the island back to the surface, thus connecting all the people of the ocean. They are joined in this task by the only fun new character, a member of the Kakamora, the seafaring tribe of adorable warrior coconuts, that Wikipedia tells me is named Kotu.

The movie also gives Moana a new baby sister, Simea (voice of Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda), who feels like her whole deal is related to ideas for new merch and for a character that can be spun off into her own adventure. When I read about the mid-credits scene, most articles mentioned that this movie was originally meant to be a streaming series, which makes all of this feel like a setup for another sequel or other content, Marvel Cinematic Universe-style, sucking up dollars and remaining creative energy. The first Moana had clarity of purpose, a streamlined story, themes about honoring the past and looking toward the future and catchy songs. Moana 2 has none of that.

But it still has the rooster and Johnson doing his affable Maui thing and a legitimately touching moment in its final act. I heard some squirming and general sounds of kid-boredom at about the hour mark at my packed screening, but kids also seemed to generally enjoy some of the goofiness and adventure. Moana 2 is, ultimately, fine — above average as family-chills-out-and-watches-a-movie entertainment, just not up to the high standard set by the original. B-

Rated PG for action/peril, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller, with a screenplay by Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller, Moana 2 is an hour and 40 minutes long and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

How to Winter, by Kari Leibowitz

How to Winter, by Kari Leibowitz (Penguin Life, 272 pages)

When Kari Leibowitz was looking for a research opportunity that would help get her into a top-notch doctoral program, she reached out to Joar Vitterso, a psychology professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. He agreed to become her research partner in studying why Norwegians, despite long periods of darkness and cold, seem relatively immune to the winter blues that so many Americans report.

So despite being something of a winter-phobe herself, having grown up at the Jersey shore, Leibowitz signed up to experience Tromsø’s “Polar Night” —the two months in which the region doesn’t get direct sunlight — and other things she thought would bring her misery. Instead she wound up studying, and ultimately adopting, a winter-loving mindset, which she says is the key to thriving in winter.

In How to Winter, Leibowitz expands on the article she wrote that appeared in The Atlantic in 2015 (“The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise”). Although she soon departed Norway for Stanford University — where winter lows are in the 40s and it hasn’t snowed since 1976 — that article established her as an expert source on coping with winter, and she’s made it a focus of her work since. How to Winter combines her experiences in northern climes with research from Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab on what amounts to positive thinking — reframing how we perceive experiences. Not surprisingly, it’s Leibowitz’s on-the-ground experiences that are the most interesting part of this book.

In Tromsø, which is in full darkness for most of the day between late November and late January (save for a bluish twilight that lasts a couple of hours), Leibowitz found that residents report relatively low rates of seasonal depression. Part of this is because the region is well-equipped for winter. “The city has infrastructure to keep the roads clear of snow and restaurants warm even when it’s blustery outside. Every restaurant and coffee shop has soft lighting and open-flame candles … and cafes often have heat lamps and blankets at outdoor tables so that people can enjoy coffee outside year-round.” At the city’s international film festival, held in January, people watch films outside, and it’s not uncommon for parents to let their appropriately dressed babies nap outside. The first principle of a winter mindset, it seems, is not to be afraid of the dark and cold.

Compare that mindset to the collective moaning and gnashing of teeth that occurs when it gets dark an hour earlier in New England. It’s not that the time change doesn’t have a real effect on our life, Leibowitz writes, but that Americans tend to follow a script about winter misery that begins about that time, rather than actively planning ways to enjoy the season. With regard to the November time change, for example, Leibowitz recommends reducing meetings and commitments the week of the change — seeing it as a time to catch up on rest, make our homes more inviting and cozy and begin pleasurable winter rituals, such as fires or saunas, or what she calls “slow hobbies” like baking, knitting or woodworking.

Animals, she writes, are more in tune with the changing of the seasons that humans are, and this is one reason many of us resist the advent of winter; we haven’t been having to prepare for it, and we expect our well-lit, furnace-warmed lives to go on as usual, rather than make changes. “We pretend we are not animals like any other, as if aligning with nature is a personal or moral failure. But this is a fallacy, and when we look at it plainly, we can see how nonsensical this view is.”

Then we’re told by the media that we’re suffering Seasonal Affective Disorder even though we probably aren’t — true diagnoses range from 0.5 to 3% of the population, and you only have SAD if you first meet the criteria for clinical depression — SAD is a subset of that. So you probably don’t have SAD — you just need a mindset that sees winter as wonderful, Leibowitz writes.

Leibowitz argues that a positive winter mindset is not the same thing as positive thinking, which too often tries to get us to deny the negative. We can’t think our way into its being 80 degrees and sunny when it’s snowing in January, but we can employ “selective attention” to overcome misery. Much of what bothers us about winter is anticipatory — we expect to be cold and miserable if we go outside, when actually when we force ourselves to get outside, it’s often pleasurable and at minimum makes our enjoyment of the indoors even greater when we return. “When we stop pushing against it and observe what it really feels like, asking ourselves, ‘How intolerable is this, really? Am I in danger or am I just a bit uncomfortable?’ the quality of the cold shifts and we find that maybe it’s not as bad as we thought.”

That’s one reason part of her advice to adopting a winter mindset is get outside (“You’re not made of sugar” is the title of one chapter), and she offers research that shows, counterintuitively, that when people do things like cold plunges and winter swimming, they wind up feeling warmer and happier after the shock of the experience.

Leibowitz acknowledges that it’s easier for some people to love winter than others. In Oulu, Finland, for example, known as “the winter biking capital of the world,” bike paths are cleared of snow before roads are. A number of Scandinavian cities have heated sidewalks so people don’t have to worry about falling on snow or ice. Leibowitz travels to places where it’s the norm to have heated floors in bathrooms, individual coat racks next to booths at restaurants and there are even heated toilet seats in public restrooms.

Moreover, she acknowledges, it might be difficult to adopt a “winter is wonderful” mindset if you don’t know how you’re going to pay your heating bill. Not many of us have access to the saunas of which she sings praises. And some of her advice at the end of each chapter is a bit cringy (“Take an awe walk” and “take a family nap”). The book could have been made tighter, and more effective, by icing out its Oprah magazine vibe.

Still, there’s value in much of Leibowitz’s advice, and her travels are interesting. I like many of her suggestions, such as to change the “holiday spirit” into the “winter spirit,” put as much thought into planning January and February as we do December, and instead of trying to force bright light into our winters in defiance of nature, embrace softer lighting and candles (a practice Leibowitz calls “Big Light Off.”) In fact she’s such an effective persuader that even a winter visit to Tromsø is sounding good right now. B

Album Reviews 24/12/05

Kodak Black, Trill Bill (Capitol Records)

This Florida-based rapper boasts the necessary cachet to make him relevant to the current generation of working-class rap fans, a cohort who seemed to have completely lost the thread of whom to be mad at. This, the second mixtape he released in November, pushes the trappy single “News Matt,” characterized by a twin vocal track that’s bluesy, intentionally sloppy and horror-movie-ready in its tonality; his swagger is still there, no worries. Lots of melody here, such as in the arpeggiated piano lines of opener “Cherish The Moment,” the cheese-soaked ’80s-keyboard-driven “Dirty Revolver” and the five-star-hotel-lobby-evoking “Maybach Van.” Not much to report in the way of percussion; nearly every drum line is identical, but that’s of course secondary. As always the idea is to microwave 30-year-old tropes from New Jack City (he even gave away a truck full of turkeys on Thanksgiving, not kidding). B

Calum Scott and Christina Perri, “Kid At Christmas” (Capitol Records)

Oops, looks like I spoke too soon in the Playlist about the end of this year’s new holiday records, although in my defense it’s rare for me to be advised about new ones after the second week of November. This one’s a pop duet between 2015’s Britain’s Got Talent winner Scott and heavily tattooed American singer-songwriter Perri, whose debut single “Jar of Hearts” was featured on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. Bless their hearts, these two wanted to create a single that’d become a “seasonal classic is for the grown-ups out there who still get a certain warm, fuzzy feeling in wintertime” and they do make an effort in this mawkish and (spoiler) vocally muscular happy-ballad. The result is something that’s too nuanced and important-sounding to be dismissed as a throwaway tune sung by the cookie-shop owner and her (hopefully future!) beau in the latest Hallmark Christmas movie, but not by much really. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• As far as the retail stores are concerned, it’s been Christmas for many weeks now. On the day after Halloween, the ever-present danger becomes real, rolling itself out slowly: We walk into our Targets and Walmarts and malls just waiting to hear the first strains of Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” It’s always that one we hear first, with its half-plugged, anodyne Chuck Berry-ish guitar, an insidious, innocent-sounding ditty bespeaking casual joyfulness, nostalgia-loaded quaintness and buying signals, a warning shot before everything descends into a frenzy, culminating in thunderously metal versions of “Carol of the Bells” while we drive around semi-aimlessly through impossible traffic, searching the stores for that one gift we Simply Must Get. For me this year — and I can talk about this here because my wife probably hasn’t read this column for years now (familiarity does breed inappreciation, not that I’d enjoy discussing my “writing process” every week with some breathlessly gushing admirer) the Simply Must Get is some coffee mugs to replace the ones she loves: Robert Gordon Hug Mugs, the “Blue Storm” pattern in specific. Of the original four she bought years ago, only one survives today; like disposable characters in a slasher film, the other three met their ends in fiendishly clever ways. The next-to-last one expired when the handle simply fell off when I was washing it last week. Given that there’s no way I’m paying $110 to have four new Blue Storm mugs imported from Australia, I’ll start my search this week; I’ll pop into the hilariously overpriced kitchen-and-bath chain stores (funny how those companies never survive more than three years, isn’t it?) and try to find the closest match. I’m hoping to get that mission accomplished before the stores shift into full-blown “last minute/final warning” mode of the holiday shopping season, when every single place you walk into, from Hot Topic to Dollar Tree, has Andy Williams’ “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” playing overhead, just to remind you that “you’re out of time, let’s cough it up already, buddy, that’d be great.” Speaking of that, the Christmas album-buying season has pretty much already ended, although the new Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter will show up on Friday, Dec. 6, featuring the ridiculously overexposed young diva duetting with Shania Twain among others. Hard pass of course.

• It may be too late for Christmas albums, but it’s never too late for older artists to microwave some Beatles songs for a quick buck or posterity or whatnot! We talked about Americana/country singer Lucinda Williams a few months ago, and I think I also mentioned that Abbey Road is the only Beatles album I can stand, so lucky for me (or someone), Williams will release Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road this Friday, the 6th! Naturally, the song I like the least on that album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is the teaser single. It’s kind of noisy, which is a positive.

• If you’d ever wanted a more sedate, epically melodic Prodigy, you may have gravitated to New York art-rock band Geese, and if you like Geese, you may like the first solo album from Geese frontman Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal, but then again maybe not! In the first single, indie piano-ballad “$0,” Winter does a low-voiced nick of a drunken Thom Yorke. I couldn’t deal with it very long but maybe his mom likes it.

• And finally it’s Austin, Texas, garage rockers White Denim, with 12, their 12th album if you don’t count their 2023 collaboration LP with Raze Regal and one or two other releases. Whatever, “Light On” combines the sounds of Relayer-era Yes with Mungo Jerry for no reason whatsoever, not that it’s officially bad.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!